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If the legend of an eight-foot winged creature with a big forehead horn isn’t fodder for a town celebration, what is?

Last spring, Minneapolis monster researcher Chad Lewis unearthed the legend with the book “Van Meter Visitor,” the name he gave the creature which prominent residents reported seeing 110 years ago in this small Dallas County town west of the Des Moines area.

It so captivated citizens that children began taking an interest in local history, a local artist was inspired to draw it and a cable television crew filmed a documentary.

Now, the first Van Meter Visitor Festival launches Saturday, promising a chilling night tour of the locations of the strange creature sightings.

Lewis dug up the story of a series of nights in the fall of 1903, when prominent Van Meter men reported seeing a half human, half animal flying creature with smooth bat wings, as reported a week later in the Des Moines Daily News. It flew about, fairly uninterested in the blasting guns of a posse determined to send it back to its nasty depths, and repaired to an old coal mine near today’s abandoned brick and tile plant, where a local farmer reports that people still try to get a glimpse of it.

The unearthed tale and its modern-day researcher appeared in the May 3 Des Moines Register and received “international attention,” Lewis said, which provided the impetus he and Van Meter Public Library director Jolena Walker needed to capitalize.

After all, Lewis said, “bizarre festivals” in Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Roswell, N.M., have cashed in on their creepy legends. The Mothman Festival attracts 4,000 people a year in West Virginia and the Roswell UFO Festival now stretches to three days of lunacy.

Van Meter is starting slower but hopes it will grow.

Lewis’ co-authors will provide the background before his tour retraces the flight of the creature at about the same time of year that it happened 110 years ago. It includes a visit near the coal mine entrance, where citizens last saw it submerge, never to be seen from again.

“Van Meter hasn’t changed much, so it will feel the same,” Lewis said.

In the months since the story re-emerged, a film crew from “Monsters and Mysteries in America” interviewed Lewis and residents in Van Meter. That will air on cable TV in the future.

“Van Meter residents dusted off boxes in grandma’s attic,” Lewis said, hoping for evidence of the legend, including a plaster cast supposedly taken of the three-toed creature.

Walker, who is organizing the festival, said it has united the town.

“It brings together an interest in history, no matter what people think, whether they think it happened or not,” Walker said. “I’ve observed children are more excited about the city’s history.”

She’s baking three-toed cookies and serving black Kool-Aid for the event, while Fat Randi’s Bar & Grill has created a special drink called “The Visitor,” a mysterious fruity mixture with several types of alcohol that could get folks seeing flying creatures. Local artist Randy Meier will unveil his work, inspired by the winged one.

“People will tell you what they think, real or not real,” Walker said. “But it sure gets discussion going.”

She’s heard only one resident comment that it makes the town look kooky, but the unearthed legend helped push forward the long-delayed formation of the Van Meter Historical Society.